In court, rioters blame social media, far-right news for actions,
Robert Gieswein is a good man, according to family and friends, who describe him as gentle and compassionate. His mother says he has “an amazing work ethic.” His younger sister calls him “the most inspiring person in my life.” He bought clothes and shoes for the residents of a nursing home where he worked as a nurse’s aide. The 24-year-old had no criminal history when he traveled to Washington in January and, according to the U.S. government, joined a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol.
Mr. Gieswein appears to be affiliated with the radical militia group the Three Percenters, the FBI says, and the leader of a “private paramilitary training group” called the Woodland Wild Dogs. On Jan. 6 he donned goggles, a camouflage shirt, an army-style helmet and a military-style vest reinforced with an armored plate and a black pouch emblazoned with “MY MOM THINKS I’M SPECIAL.” Then, wielding a baseball bat and a noxious spray, he stormed the U.S. Capitol, attacked a federal officer and helped halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election, the government claims.
Mr. Gieswein has pleaded not guilty to six criminal counts, including assaulting an officer and destruction of government property. Now he wants to be let out of jail, subject to very strict conditions, while he awaits trial — because the man he really is, according to his lawyer, is not the man the government says he was on that day.
“If what the government says is true, then Mr. Gieswein committed assault on January 6,” federal public defender Ann Mason Rigby said July 1 during a hearing on his detention. “The question before the court is: Is he incorrigibly violent? Is that a characteristic that cannot be controlled? And that’s why you have to look at his history.”
That’s what the U.S. District Court in D.C. is doing with at least 535 people who were somehow involved in the breach of the Capitol; there are hundreds of ongoing investigations beyond that, according to FBI director Christopher A. Wray.
Were these people acting on their most deeply held convictions, or were they somehow not themselves on Jan. 6?
Six months of evidence, court filings and motion hearings have created a composite sketch of the people arrested — in all their treachery or bone-headedness — and of the country many said they were fighting for.
Some defendants seemed bent on bloodshed and were charged with felonies. including conspiracy. One group dressed in combat attire used walkie-talkies, adopted code names such as “gator 1” and “gator 6,” and, once inside, appeared to be searching for legislators, according to the government.
Many defendants are charged with misdemeanors, such as disorderly conduct; their legal defense rests on the distinction between causing the chaos and merely being swept up in it.
Lawyers blame former President Donald Trump, the media, naivete, trauma, unemployment, the pandemic, Washington elites, their clients’ childhoods and the singular nature of the event itself. The first sacking of the Capitol in 209 years — this time by Americans, not invading foreigners — has prompted extraordinary attempts to explain the actions of participants.
“Mr. Gieswein did not go to any great lengths on January 6,” Ms. Rigby wrote last month, arguing for his release. “He simply got in his car, drove to the District, joined an enormous crowd, walked up to the Capitol, and encountered what most agree was a very light, unprepared, and possibly surprised police presence at the Capitol facing the same crowd, many of them riled up by the Commander-in-Chief, and all of them undoubtedly riled up by each other.”
The insurrection itself, in other words, has been deployed as a defense. The mob mentality made them do it.
“I got caught up in the moment,” said Josiah Colt, the Idaho man who was photographed hanging off the Senate balcony in a helmet and kneepads and sitting in the vice president’s chair. (Recently, he agreed to plead guilty to felony obstruction of Congress.)
Shades of gray
The Capitol breach cases, as the Department of Justice calls them, look black and white, but the defendants are being portrayed in shades of gray.
One of Mr. Gieswein’s friends wrote to the court about the Woodland Wild
Dogs, the purported “paramilitary training force” that Mr. Gieswein leads in his hometown, not far from Colorado Springs, Colo. The friend described it as a group of buddies with a shared interest in camping, shooting and outdoor survival — not in overthrowing the government.
“I have never seen Bobby threaten violence, let alone commit violence against another person,” another friend wrote in his own declaration.
In a February interview, another character witness told the FBI: “Bobby has been going through a lot in his life recently.”
Many of the Jan. 6 defendants had been going through a lot. This is both a sad truth and a crucial part of their legal strategy. The pandemic triggered job losses and losses of direction and security. Searching for order and meaning, they immersed themselves in politics, conspiracy, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and right-wing media. One attorney has cited “Trumpitis” and “Foxmania.” Lawyers have mounted what you might call an externalized-insanity argument: The defendants were hearing voices saying the presidential election would be stolen by sinister forces unless they intervened. It was a delusion, but the voices were real. And one of them belonged to the president of the United States.
Anthony Antonio lost his job because of the pandemic, moved in with friends who watched Fox News constantly and said he came to Washington because Mr. Trump commanded him. (Charged with five counts including obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, he has yet to enter a plea.)
“The reason he was there is because he was a dumb — and believed what he heard on Fox News,” Mr. Antonio’s attorney, Joseph Hurley, said in an interview in May.
Eric Munchel, who was photographed leaping through the Senate gallery carrying zip-tie handcuffs, was there to protect his mother, according to his attorney. Inside the Capitol, Mr. Munchel attempted to limit her movements and was recorded yelling things like “What’s your goal here, Mom? ... Wait, Mom. Mom! ... Mom, where are you going? Mom, focus, don’t lose me.” (Mr. Munchel and his mother pleaded not guilty last month to eight counts,
“I’ve lived a sheltered life and truly haven’t experienced life the way many have. At first it didn’t dawn on me, but later I realized that if every person like me, who wasn’t violent, was removed from that crowd, the ones who were violent may have lost the nerve to do what they did.”
— Anna Morgan-Lloyd, participant in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot
including conspiracy to obstruct Congress.)
Personal baggage has been submitted as evidence. Douglas Jensen — the Iowa man who wore a “Q” shirt and stalked Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman up a flight of stairs — is “the product of a dysfunctional childhood” spent mostly in foster care, according to his lawyer, who said that Mr. Jensen, saddled with stress, became a “true believer” in QAnon, an extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat.
“Maybe it was midlife crisis, the pandemic, or perhaps the message just seemed to elevate him from his ordinary life to an exalted status with an honorable goal,” his lawyer wrote last month in a petition to release Mr. Jensen from jail as he awaits trial for disrupting government business and obstructing an officer during a civil disorder. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
‘It’s not fair’
A sense of victimhood still burns in some defendants, who’ve offered a litany of grievances while caught in the gears of the legal system.
“It’s not fair,” yelled Richard Barnett — who famously propped his feet on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office — referring to his detention during a March 4 hearing.
Trying to secure his release, Mr. Barnett’s attorney describedhim as a retired firefighter “beloved” in his western Arkansas community. He was“swept inside with a mass wave of people.” The attorney accused government prosecutors of concocting a “cocktail of mischaracterization of truth and invention of fact” abouthim and urged the court to “resist the temptation to consume this cocktail.” (Mr. Barnett has pleaded not guilty to seven counts, including obstructing an official proceeding.)
Other lawyers have argued that their defendants are the ones who were served cocktails of misinformation. Albert Watkins, who represents multiple Jan. 6 defendants, likened them to the followers of Jim Jones, the 1970s cult leader who persuaded his followers to commit suicide by drinking grape punch spiked with cyanide.
Mr. Watkins tried the unique tactic of calling his clients “... retarded” in the press. On television the crowd that overtook the Capitol looked like a powerful, unruly mob, but they arrived at this historic desecration burdened with “overwhelming hardships and vulnerabilities,” as Mr. Watkins said about Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” during a recent hearing. (Mr. Chansley has pleaded not guilty to six counts, including obstructing an official proceeding.)
Jan. 6 was a product of the nation’s “divisiveness, intolerance, untruths, misrepresentations and mischaracterizations through an unrelenting multiyear propaganda odyssey,” Mr. Watkins wrote last month in defense of Mr. Chansley, who was photographed on the dais of the U.S. Senate barechested and sporting a horned headdress of animal pelts.
Vortex of forces
It’s a lot to absorb, psychologically and legally. The FBI is still tracking down participants and digging through their life stories. D.C. judges are handling multiple hearings per day; at least 11 were on the court’s calendar last Monday alone. Defendants languish in jail as their families suffer. Attorneys are deluged with video and photo evidence produced by their own clients and gathered by the government. Amid the echoes and static of remote hearings, players are debating the differences between a principal actor and an aider or abettor, if a “momentary lapse in judgment” could last multiple hours, and whether a weapon meets the legal definition of “dangerous” if it didn’t cause serious harm.
The question at the core of this massive effort is what to do with the people who led normal lives until Jan. 6, when a vortex of forces compelled them to engage in criminal behavior.
“These are weighty issues. All the judges are consumed by these issues,” said U.S. District Judge Emmett Sullivan during a motion hearing for Mr. Gieswein earlier this month, adding that many of the defendants “come to court with unblemished records — they never paid a fine over 50 bucks.”
“The event’s unprecedented,” says Mary McCord, a former acting assistant U.S. attorney for national security who worked on a security review of Jan. 6 earlier this year. “Anytime you take an individual U.S. attorney’s office that is solely responsible for anything massive on this scale, it’s an allhands-on-deck situation.”
Some defendants have accepted responsibility and emerged from the legal process with a different view of both themselves and Jan. 6.
The day after the breach, Anna Morgan-Lloyd described it as “the most exciting day of my life.”
Last month, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of demonstrating inside the Capitol. “I just want to apologize,” Ms. MorganLloyd told a judge, becoming the first defendant to be sentenced: $500 in restitution and 40 hours of community service. She said her goals were peaceful and that she was “ashamed” by the “savage display of violence that day.” At the suggestion of her attorney, she submitted repentant writing to the court, including book and movie reports on “Schindler’s List” and the legal memoir “Just Mercy.”
“I’ve lived a sheltered life and truly haven’t experienced life the way many have,” wroteMs. Morgan-Lloyd, who worked for a medical device maker in Indiana. “At first it didn’t dawn on me, but later I realized that if every person like me, who wasn’t violent, was removed from that crowd, the ones who were violentmay have lost the nerve to dowhat they did.”